This post provides a brief update on the UC-Elsevier situation and then points to related developments elsewhere that, taken together, shed light on where big deal negotiations in general are headed.  

In recent years, many universities have concluded that the price they pay for their Big Deal journal license agreements and the resulting value they perceive have become misaligned. As a consequence, academia has stiffened its negotiating posture with leading journal publishers. The outcome of these negotiations can be grouped into two categories: rebundling and unbundling. Most attention in recent years has been given over to the search for open access, by transforming Big Deal subscriptions into rebundled transformative agreements.

Boycotting only the review function seems like it might be a nice way for folks to thread the needle of divesting from closed venues without as much career risk as an author boycott or a total boycott. To the extent that scholars feel like reviewing is high cost and low reward - it takes a lot of time but doesn’t really carry much cachet compared to authoring - this could be a good way to drain resources from closed venues without a stiff penalty to faculty.

The ecosystem metaphor works quite well for scholarly publishing, too, and there’s even a term, “bibliodiversity,” to describe the degree to which the publishing ecosystem is comprised of a healthy balance of different systems, approaches, and actors (and different kinds of systems, approaches, and actors). Just as biological diversity is good for a living ecosystem, and cultural diversity is good for a living culture, bibliodiversity is good for the culture of scholarly publishing.

In lieu of the usual academic article or long-ish blogpost, I want to share three major Big Deal breakups that were announced in the last couple of days. Iowa State, UNC-Chapel Hill and the entire SUNY system have announced that they are breaking up their Big Deals with Elsevier, switching to an a la carte set of their most-used journal titles.

In an announcement posted today, the Provost and University Librarian at UNC Chapel Hill  explain that they are making major cuts to their Elsevier Big Deal, dropping the vast majority of titles and subscribing to just the core, frequently-used part of the portfolio. The full announcement is worth a read, as is this Twitter thread from Elaine Westbrooks. Some commentary from me:

The title of this week’s Big Deal Longread says it all: “The NIH public access policy did not harm biomedical journals.” Publishers raised all the usual alarms about the NIH policy—it would make it impossible for them to cover their cost (much less their 40% profit margins…) and peer review as we know it would come to a screeching halt. Science would fall apart. Dogs and cats would live together. You get the idea. Well, according to this week’s study, they were wrong.